Tutorial: The best way to sharpen portraits in Photoshop

Sharpening plays an important role in influencing how the human eye interprets a photo and it is the only way to create the illusion of higher definition and detail. Also, much like we use light, color, and composition, it is an extremely effective way to guide the eyes of the viewer to wherever you want them to focus.

The first question to ask isn’t how to sharpen but when to sharpen. Any retouching, compositing, coloring, and any other edits you’ve made should be included in the sharpening process. So make sure that it’s the final step in your workflow just before you export! It’s important to note that you’ll want to resize your images beforehand as well. Resizing an image that has already been sharpened can have adverse effects such as reducing or exaggerating the amount of sharpening.

For example, if you want to upload one of your latest photos to Instagram, first resize your image to 1080 x 1080 pixels (their recommended dimensions for square images). Then go through the sharpening process as normal. Doing this will guarantee that your image quality will be consistent no matter what size your image is or where it will be displayed.

To begin the sharpening process, create a new layer, go to the Image menu, and select Apply Image. Apply Image will take all of the visible layers in your project and merge them together onto the new layer. This will allow you to sharpen your final image (including all of the edits you’ve made) without affecting the originals.

As far as technique goes, there are many ways to sharpen an image. I’ve always preferred the High Pass method which involves converting the new merged image into a Smart Object and then using a High Pass Filter to apply the sharpening effect. Since we’re working with a Smart Object and a Smart Filter, we can always go back to make changes to the radius by simply double-clicking on the High Pass option underneath the layer.

My favorite thing about this technique is just how flexible and precise it can be! If I ever need to make changes to the amount of sharpening I can either duplicate the sharpening layer (for a subtle adjustment), change the radius of the High Pass Filter, raise or lower the opacity, or simply paint with the Brush Tool on the layer mask.

Using Layer Masks, you can apply different levels of sharpening to different parts of a photo. You can have a sharpening layer just for facial features and a second for wardrobe. Create as many layers of sharpening as you need to get the look that you want. Overall, focus your sharpening on aesthetic details in your photo—hair, eyes, jewelry, details in clothing—anything that you want to stand out. Avoid sharpening things that might distract the viewer or bring out details you don’t want to be as noticeable (i.e. pores).

Like most things that we’ll do in Photoshop, sharpening is highly subjective. It’s up to you to determine where and how much to sharpen. And while we use a portrait as our example, this method works across all types of photography! This is a process I’ve developed over several years and it has served me well. So give it a try! I only hope that it helps you figure out your own favorite method that’s best suited for you and your work.

About the Author: For over seven years, Aaron Nace has been teaching photography and photo manipulation on PHLEARN.com to millions of users across the world at every skill level. You can subscribe for his professional videos or view the Photoshop tutorials as well.

I'm with some others who comment that this technique is a bit fussy for the end result and as good an effect can probably be obtained in other less complex ways.One final point... I'm a regular watcher of many online video channels for photography, the majority from the USA. It may be just me but the propensity for Americans to preface so many verbs with "going to go ahead and..." is irritating. I know, I really do know, that we British have vocabulary quirks Americans (and others) will find equally annoying. I just had to mention that because it is so common on otherwise great videos.

I tend to agree with some comments that this is just one approach which for me fails in that it's doing more than sharpening... there's also noticeable tonal shifts and increased contrast due to pulling highlights and shadow tone apart which I would not want. Personally I cringed seeing how overdone the eyes and facial hair was taken. The use of layers and brushing in areas are a good lesson to take away from it however....

All you that have strong opinion on sharpening and even stronger opinion on this tutorial. Please do learn something about sharpening, and then comment.

Sharpening of an image is something you do as a final step in order to optimize acutance according to the viewing conditions of the image. In order for the image to get the best crispness for your intentions.

Sure, most of us apply a general sharpening in order to balance the softness created by Bayer interpolation. I also do that. And this is really what most of you talk about. But, this we only do for good measure, because we like it. In practice it is probably almost always unnecessary with regard to the final print or image on the net.

The final sharpening will probably have a much larger diameter and increase the local contrast at mucj lower frequencies than the one this general sharpening affects.

Please just adjust capture sharpening and apply some smart sharpen or unsharp mask at the end, use sharp lenses. Everything else is such a waste of time. The sharpening rabbit hole has no end if you choose to fall in it. Literally no one else will care.

I usually set sharpening in the camera and can post; in the camera. As in ROTC; AKA no editing. I would use Gimp when developing from Raw (I use ufraw with one button to Gimp STABLE; which is just one way) or when doing fancy edits. Like pimple removing (healing brush) or different versions. I NEVER save interim copies; but you certainly can. .PNG is awesome for trying different editors. Been there and use Gimp.

I think the "best way something" is 50's marketing...There are numerous techniques each one depending on subject and on output.Numerous plugins or standalone sw deliver at lest equivalent results (usually better) than ps tools and techniques in a fraction of time needed in ps.Anyway the value of tutorials usually help to comprehend the ps mechanisms so someone can be very effective using additional plugins or standalone sw.

It is always so interesting to see this kind things tutorials, when the same methods were used like 20 years ago with a GIMP to do the same results. Only difference really was that Photoshop started to get more and more automations "one click feature" that didn't really do a good job compared when you did each step yourself by knowing what each step does. So learning curve was higher as GIMP required more knowledge than Photoshop but you got better results with GIMP than with Photoshop.

And then still many of these tutorials gets many things wrong, like example the Photoshop is designed so that you can't really affect anymore the order when the effects are done as Photoshop follows the order that the specific Adobe worker (I don't remember his name) designed it to work in optimal manner, so example when you do sharpening, it is always the last effect Photoshop does, even if you adjust after it everything else.

Having watched it to the end now, this is terrible. The eyebrow on our left in the before/after result is so oversharpened it shines white. In what world is that good? I have watched some of the phlearn videos before and they are informative but this was overdone.

I prefer to just use smart sharpen, which lets you adjust radius so smoother skin and OOF BG is left alone. Much faster too.

It is always sad when people show they do not understand what composition means. These are often the same people who think shallow DoF is what makes all photos look good...as we just saw.There are dozens of ways to compose an image to draw the eye to the subject. Limiting DoF is only one.

Why would that be sad? Im no old hand at photography, bought my first ILC 7 years ago. My idea of "composition" didn't include DOF control, if you are saying im wrong, just say so, the dramatic tone isn't necessary.

Something tells me you are one of those guys who also complains about the improper use of the word bokeh. And whether you think shallow DOF looks good or not, enough casuals think it does to spur EVERY smartphone MFG to develop fake bokeh.

I prefer brush in LR with sharpening applied which you can divide into different parts on the human face. No need for lenghty PS process. Should work 99 percent of the time.

I usually dont shapen the face thought but remove some clarity rather and remove some face issue (patching also works quite fine in LR) with moving the colour slider for orange and yellow. The only sharpening I am doing is to eyes sometimes to make them little pop-up.

The PS technique seems to me not time affective against the provided result.

Well sure; anytime you want selective (in frame) edit then use a brush. I do that with Gimp. I was painting-in background blur, over small sensor noise; when it wasn't cool. That's a tip for the crap sensor "good enough" crowd. Or just when the light wasn't perfect; but the foreground is good. Which can be a lot.

Shouldn't we all know there's the manual layer way, the many pre-made slider ways, and the brush ways? Etc... You really should load up all the additions to Gimp with it. They are free to try (keep and progressively upgrade without BS); without deleting anything else.

And just because there's a million ways to skin a cat, different cats and your dumb preferences doesn't mean there still isn't a "best" for a given. Like generally The Gimp.

Always Adobe, Adobe, Adobe... Would be nice to see some tipps and tricks for other imaging software available on DPR as well, such as Luminar, Affinity, Gimp, Rawtherapie since not everyone wants to be trapped in a subscription business model.

Check out the "wavelet decomposition" filter in GIMP, which I just discovered yesterday - it automatically creates as many different high/low pass layers as you want, each covering a different spatial frequency band of the photo, allowing wholesale removal of blemishes without taking out fine skin textures.

You can use a very similar process in GIMP. Make a new layer from visible. Desaturate this layer and apply Filter - Enhance - Highpass (I'm referring to GIMP 2.10 here; 2.8 also has a high pass filter but I don't remember if it's in the same menu location). Choose your radius: a small blur brings out fine details, a larger blur enhances coarse details. Set the highpass layer to Grain Merge mode... or to Soft Light for a subtler effect.

Now mask the highpass layer so it affects only the places you want to sharpen. GIMP does not have smart objects so you cannot go back and change the blur radius later. You can, however, adjust the layer opacity. And you can make as many high pass layers as you want. Best of all: you can run noise reduction on the highpass layer so you aren't sharpening noise.

I expect you can do this with any software that supports layers and high pass filters. Rarely do I see a Photoshop technique that we can't use in GIMP.

I use High Pass as well (yet, not for 100% of photos).I am not a pro. Do editing just for my family photos.

Here is my approach for this filter usage:1) New composed layer (optional: make it as a Smart Object)2) Use High Pass. 3) Remove color from the layer (SHIFT+CTRL+U in photoshop for Win) 4) Surface blur (just to remove sharpening for noise or skin pore).5) Blending mode is Overlay (for more sharpening) or Soft Light (for less aggressive sharpening) 6) Edit later's mask if needed7) Adjust layer opacity if needed

Sometime, I do the steps several times with different parameters for step 2 (High Pass). There could be high radius ( 4 or even 6 ) for big elements sharpening (yet, not for portraits), middle (from 2 to 3) for eyes/lips/hair/clothes, small for (from 0.5 to 2,5) for skin/eyes/hair/clothes.

As an option, in case there is lot of almost one color background (like white/black or blue skies), instead of masking it via a mask editing, I use Blend If.

Several prominent pros don't sharpen, Jeff Ascough for one. I feel sharpening portraits is unnecessary, for the most part it's totally over done. Many camera's now don't even have AA filters so for the most part don't even need to be sharpened much, if at all, regardless of the notion that "digital files need sharpened always," I don't buy it.

with latest camera missing AA or being very weak the facial issues pop-up so much sometimes....I even remove some clarity to clear it up a little bit in LR and applying other tools LR provide to make the face looking cleaner. I dont like portraits which are completely ironed which is sometimes the trend nowdays .

Indeed and for portraits, most of today's lenses resolve well enough for facial features. I find it hard to accept that a razor-sharp meter wide print with facial hair follicles showing is as intriguing as a landscape equivalent of nature.

Don't worry about that, next week maybe you´ll see written that after all to have sharpen images is to buy a good lenses. This is a kind of thing every week changes.I have a half camera with half resolution of yours and I don't need this kind of thing.

Wonderful tutorial. I'm a little surprised at some of the comments. I've ben Phlearning for years and now love taking my favorite images for a trip into PhotoChop. I use ultra "sharp" primes and they hugely benefit from post work. Be it color, luminosity blending and masking, or sharpness. Thanks to DP Review for taking us beyond comparing equipment.

Doesn't HPF already prevent OOF areas from being sharpened since your radius adjustment allows for a selective contrast? If you have your radius set to like 5, OOF areas are too low contrast to be targeted no?

Perhaps you're confusing the purpose of the tutorial. It's not a tutorial on posing or composition; how to achieve "emotions," or creating a portrait with "emotion." It's a tutorial on one approach to sharpening images; a very high level one at that. Different people can use the techniques in this tutorial in different ways for different photos.

@ photomeeting, Sharpening can be used for portraits. You dont need to sharpen the entire image, you can be selective. For example a corporate headshot your may want to sharpen up subjects suit/clothes as this gives a cleaner more striking look.

Sometimes I sharpen up the only the Hair and Eyes, as this makes the subject pop more without affecting the skin which sometimes you dont want to sharpen and often I want to soften/blur

And when the Background is OOF i definitely mask that out and do not sharpen that

So much misunderstanding in the comments. And such lazy guys. With some practice, what he did is made very fast. Different sharpening of skin and cloth is not too advanced or unnecessary skills.

And, of course, the usual misunderstanding of the word sharp. A sharp lens has nothing to do with a sharpened image. A sharp lens has high resolution. A sharpened image has higher acutance. Resolution and acutance is not the same thing. Resolution is how small details you can resolve. Acutance is the level of amplification of high frequencies in the image. Increasing acutance do not give you more details, it only makes the details higher contrast.

Therefore you cannot get a sharper lens so you do not have to sharpen the image.

Guys - you do just as you wish. Actually - I do not either use this involved technique - I am no portrait photographer. But - I clearly see the advantage in the work the guy does - so why this belittling of his techniques? It has value to some - let them use it.

I feel sorry for anyone having a "Facebook page" is not that self-promotion, as in "look at me I did this photo, ain't I'm a good boy". Then again there are no sarcasm filters on this forum so I never know.

@Roland: I could not agree more. People who say something along the lines of "I have a sharp lens, I don't have to worry about it," or "get a sharper lens," show a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of sharpening a digital photo.

The bottom line is this is a very high level tutorial that people can modify to adapt to their own processes. I have various approaches to sharpening images, one of them is quite similar to this one. The amount of time it takes to selectively sharpen a photo using this method is very short after you've done it a few times.

@DonaldB - just a thought. If you have 800 portraits to do, then, of course, you almost have to batch post process them identical. No one have even hinted at that you shall do this for 800 portraits. Not even hinted at that you shall do them manually, one by one. And to be a bit frank - I do not really think you do 800 "portraits" at all. This is some kind of school photo or similar.

You can have the sharpest lens known to humanity and if you're shooting digital and raw, almost every image can use a bit of sharpening. It's the nature of digital. If you shoot JPG and SOOC, most likely your SOOC JPGs have camera applied sharpening.

I understand that. It doesn't change the fact that digital raw images are generally a bit soft no matter how sharp a lens is. You get around this by using various sharpening techniques in post production. Even though it's not exactly the same sense as in a lens, it's still achieving the same goal; increase perceived sharpness of an otherwise naturally soft image.

Sorry Krav Maga that was intended for the OP, i actually do agree with what you are saying, all images are improved with sharpening even those taken with the Sharpest lenses, that was my intended Point.

I’ve bene doing this stuff professionally for a while now and the only method I use it Smart Sharpen in Ps and the built in Lightroom sharpening.

In Photoshop: Duplicate your layer, smart sharpen as much as you want, and layer mask out any trouble areas that you may not want sharpened. If you want to draw attention to certain textures just duplicate again, sharpen again, and mask in what you want. Use export for web to save your JPEGs at size.

With Lightroom sharpen as much as you like . Brush in more sharpening if needed but ALWAYS sharpen upon export for your preferred media and export at the final size.

Oh and sharpened more than you think you need for print.

I’ve prepped images up to 20’ high and retouched images for products that come in orders of millions and these methods have always sufficed for my purposes. Some of the fancier methods might look better in a side by side 400% crop, but I doubt anyone will notice when presented.

I use what I guess is the Schewe method: Merge layers up(option/command/shift/E) make the luminosity and 66% opacity - apply unsharp filter - vary opacity/mask to taste. The unsharp preview window does not account for the luminosity mode, so view the image itself when adjusting the filter.

Another critical thing is to have the image at an even multiple of 100%: 25/50/100 because PS will add a lot of aliasing in other sizes.

I'll play with your method too - more tools is good.

I think the key with any sharpening method is a light touch - use as little as possible.

I use Photoshop CS2, so I often copy and merge all the layers so that, in effect, I can make changes non-destructive that otherwise would not be. I regularly use that to see if auto contrast or auto colour improve the results. Sometimes I think the effect of doing that is helpful but too severe. An easy way to solve that is to make a further adjustment by lowering the opacity.

But another use for this is sharpening. Rather than change the settings for that, if a less severe setting is likely to be preferred, sometimes I adjust the opacity. I find that a useful thing to do and I would do so sometimes even if I had a version of Photoshop where sharpening is non-destructive. It is especially useful where one wants sharpening of only part of the image. Adding a mask to the top layer is the way I do that.

OK as long as we're keeping it real you probably know the Raw file (you backup) is always non-destructed and contains a version of the cameras JPEG (as some res). Meaning forget non-destructive; but you can always save a base rendition to make variations( I just make variations when needed and never save interim files). Why? Because any rare re-starting from Raw (like more renditions later) is not slow to me. I can probably improve on the whole thing (differently) by then. You just don't need to keep that (interim files or non-destructive ways) either. Really only when testing several different editors might you save (after a Raw dev standard) a control photo experiment. Such as a .PNG.

But you all are welcome to keep catalogs and think non-destructive matters. Life's just to short. If you have the Raw file then you have everything you can and the Raw file (backed up) never changes.

That certainly looks super advanced. Yet... I used to use high-pass a few years back until I learned how to use an Unsharp Mask properly :)Unlike high-pass filter, which changes only the radius, Unsharp Mask also changes the intensity and, most importantly, sensitivity (threshold), which enables doing everything that was shown here in as many as two layers, without masking.

Law of diminishing returns starts to apply at some point. For me, the LR sliders for amount, detail, and mask (using the ALT modifier to see the effect better on screen) fulfills my needs most of the time. I've seen some impressive results with the old NIK sharpener but again - diminishing returns for the extra effort.

Yeah, the author is probably right. No, I'm not going through all that hassle.

I'll sharpen the whole thing like I always do, and basically I just over-sharpen until something in the image gets crispy and then back off a little. That generally has worked for me. I also sharpen last, before a print or before posting to web.

I don't think that local sharpening would really benefit my pictures much.

I usually sharpen with Neat Image's integrated sharpener, where I can choose the amount of sharpening in three levels (fine/medium/coarse details). Fine at 10-25% and medium at 25-50% range usually does the trick.

Way too time consuming for me. Just set default sharpening levels sensibly during RAW conversion (e.g. the Adobe defauts) and then use the sharpening brush at 25% intensity to add a little more bite where needed. Simples.

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